rluzinski

I have worked in orthopedics for quite a long time and noted on my twitter feed that the training staff immediately did a stability test on his knee. I had a lot of people asking me not to jump to conclusions but it was 100% apparent that they were concerned with the stability of his ACL. Allowing him to jog to the dugout and take a swing in the batters circle is attributable to a high amount of adrenaline going through his system blocking out a good deal of the pain...and a young mans desire not to get pulled from a game. In my opinion the training staff handled this perfectly and there was no further damage that could have been done from a little jog and one swing. You have to let the athlete tell you what hurts and what doesn't feel right. He felt ok for jogging...but the rotation allowed by the torn ACL was felt during a swing... Yes, it was quite clear from the TV that they checked the joint for stability. I was actually surprised by how hard the trainer was yanking on Gamel's knee.

My (honest) mistake on the number of starts but he's pitched a grand total of 6-2/rd innings in AAA this year. If you are suggesting you weren't purposely exaggerating, sure, OK. And I agree with Edner, I don't think Suppan pitched good at all. Anything can happen over 5 IP though. I can appreciate why it's hard for some fans to stomach him blanking the Brewers over 5 IP but I don't think it's a big deal in the grand scheme of things. There are always plenty of gut wrenching losses and inspiring wins over the course of 162 games.

He made one start in AAA this year. Be as disappointed as you want but that's no excuse to mislead people. He has a 5.4 ERA ZiPS projection. His fastball averaged 86-87 MPH today . He's has #6/#7 starter material I would guess. It's a shame we needed our joke of a backup 1B and our pitcher to come up with big hits with the bases loaded earlier in the game.

This team is peppered with below average defenders but we are going to put Green at 1B? The makeup of this team is just getting weirder and weirder.

Like I said before, people can decide what they consider acceptable or not. I'm just giving you the reality of the situation.

Suppan has a ZiPS projected ERA of 5.4. I guy like that is going to have a decent amount of good starts, even against decent offenses. That's just the reality of the game of baseball. You are free to define what level of performance is personally acceptable to you, of course. If your expectation, however, is for the Brewers to ALWAYS destroy mediocre/bad starting pitchers, that's simply unrealistic. Those kind of unrealistic expectations are what drives some Brewer fans to propagate the myth that the Brewers always struggle against soft tossers/bad starting pitchers. I see where you are going with this but we are talking about a washed up Suppan who posted a 4.78 ERA in AAA last year and a 12.14 ERA so far in AAA this year. As EatMeat said anything less than dominating Suppan will be unacceptable. That projection takes into account his AAA performance last year. He's basically a replacement level/AAAA pitcher at this point. In a 6 IP start, he's projected to give up an average of 3.6 runs. That means he will give up 3 runs or less more often than he does 4 or more (you can give up 7+ runs but not negative runs). Even if you think Suppan is really a 6 ERA pitcher, he's still going to have some half way reasonable starts. Assuming Suppan should be expected to get lit up every time he pitches is just not how the game of baseball works. I don't understand why baseball fans have such a hard time accepting that.

I'd be OK if the Brewers had any reasonable left handed option at 1B. Ishikawa is a joke at 1B. A sub .300 OBP and sub .400 SLG projection for a 1B is embarrassing.

As I pointed out in the in game thread, Suppan has a ZiPS projected ERA of 5.4. I guy like that is still going to have a decent amount of good starts, even against decent offenses. If the expectation is for the Brewers to ALWAYS destroy mediocre/bad starting pitchers, that's simply unrealistic. It's that unrealistic expectation that drives some Brewer fans to propagate the myth that the Brewers in general struggle against soft tossers/bad starting pitchers. I have seen no evidence to support the theory that the Brewers offense has under performed against below average pitchers over the last several years. If someone has some (non anecdotal) evidence, please share it here. And no, "everyone knows it's true!", is not evidence.

Suppan has a ZiPS projected ERA of 5.4. I guy like that is going to have a decent amount of good starts, even against decent offenses. That's just the reality of the game of baseball. You are free to define what level of performance is personally acceptable to you, of course. If your expectation, however, is for the Brewers to ALWAYS destroy mediocre/bad starting pitchers, that's simply unrealistic. Those kind of unrealistic expectations are what drives some Brewer fans to propagate the myth that the Brewers always struggle against soft tossers/bad starting pitchers.

An average aging batters will lose power but will continue to see an increase in walk rate so I dont think that's true. Of course, there's some sample bias going on as well.

Back end of the rotation starting pitcher working his way through the lineup for the third time. You are probably only going to get one more inning out of him, so I don't really see the point of not pinch hitting for him. Even a tired bullpen is probably expected to do at least as well. And wow, Estrada agrees that he should have been allowed to keep pitching? Who would have guessed that.

Johan Santana pre-injury is probably the poster boy for this strategy. I want to say that he was in middle relief for at least a year and a half before dominating the AL. I think it is the best approach for most playoff caliber teams.quote] If a team can afford to lose out on hundreds of pre arby innings, sure.

It's sad that our backup 1B is batting 8th even with the platoon advantage but I will certainly take that HR! We can certainly debate where Gamel should bat in the lineup against LHP but quoting a split from less than a month's worth of AB's doesn't et us any closer to answering the question.

Gomez is a great defender and a terrible hitter. I am disappointing anytime I see him starting anywhere but against a lefty while batting 8th.

I looked at the "The Brewers always struggle against bad/inexperienced starting pitchers" theory. I found nothing for that particular year. Really, why should we believe anything like that is really true? It's just baseball fans having unrealistic expectations of their team always being able to beat up on certain pitchers.

Moving any outfielder to SS under any non emergency situation is well beyond "creative".

If you are referring to scouting-based observations (e.g. Is player so-in-so taking a different approach at the plate?), comment away. If you are referring to strictly statistical trends, it's simply a matter of how confident you are that the trends you see represent reality. If we want to use a player or team's performance over a period of time to estimate expected future performance, the sample size plays a huge role in knowing how confident we can be in that estimate. Any statistical estimate should really include confidence intervals. Using the simplest example, if I have a special coin that flips heads a constant percentage of the time between 0-100%, we can estimate the true percentage of heads based on flipping that coin. The more times we flip it, the better the average head flip percentage represents the actual percentage. In the baseball world, it's a lot more complicated of course. We have to deal with many other variables and we also have to consider regression to the mean. There are articles that have been written on this topic that explain all this much better than I could but if you want to know how relevant this year's stats are to a players expected future performance, I have a trick for you. For a particular player, just compare his preseason projection to an updated projection (includes his performance so far this year). Fangraphs has the ZiPS preseason projections as well as a rest-of-season (ROS) projection. here's an example: Armis Ramirez: ZiPS preseason: .278/.340/.476 2012: .174/.235/.283 ZiPS ROS: .271/.333/.465 http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=1002&position=3B That is not an insignificant difference but it's not exactly predicting a terrible season going forward, either.

I think we all had hopes/expectations that Hart could be an above average OFer when he was first called up. I think it was clear pretty quick that it just wasn't going to happen, however. I don't think he's as slow as some think but he doesn't get good jumps and doesn't always take good routes. It is what it is. If he can remain just a little below average defensively, he'll stay in RF. He'll probably move to 1B at some point though.

Any lineup that has Gonzalez batting 7th and Gomez 8th would look good enough to me. The fact that RR sees fit to bat 2nd a guy with a projected OBP below .300 shows me he just doesn't get it. Yeh, he has the platoon advantage but so does most of the lineup.

Exactly. His ZiPS projection is .231/.306/.365. That is terrible for a backup 1B/corner OFer.

No batter is 100% successful with sacrifices so that better not be your expectation when judging strategies. Sacrifice attempts result in 1 or 2 outs a non-insignificant amount of the time, so that needs to be considered.

It was questionable to start with. It was just wrong when the count was 2-0 IMO. It's not that I think there's no place for small ball. I just think RR is getting increasingly married to it. Keep em guessing.

Screw your damn small ball, RR!

2-0. Swing away! EDIT: Of course not.

Please, no small ball for once.